Abstract
Traditional safety analysis for nuclear power plants (NPPs) with system codes with more conservative assumptions to ensure the plant safety. However, it would scarify the operation flexibility and efficiency. On the other hand, system codes could not analyze local phenomenon in the NPPs. Therefore, Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) is gradually adopted in the nuclear safety analysis. Oxidation of a Zircaloy cladding exposed to high-temperature steam is an important phenomenon in the safety analysis during a loss-of-coolant accident (LOCA), since a Zircaloy/steam reaction is highly exothermic and results in hydrogen production that may cause serious accident. Consequently, the development of CFD Model for the zirconium-water reaction of fuel cladding is quite essential. In this paper, the CFD predictions of a temperature rise and hydrogen production due to Zircaloy/steam oxidation were compared with the results of the CFX-10 simulations. From these validation processes, it is shown that the analysis process of Zircaloy/steam reaction was built.